Gourmet Secrets by Karen Anand: A mouthful of Coorg

The more I travel in India the more I realise what amazing diversity of food we have and how regional specialties are often misconceived in either the press or in restaurants. I recently visited Coorg in southern India. About 250kms from Bengaluru, it’s an area with a sense of nobility and belonging, of dense forests, coffee plantations and some spectacular estates. The terrain is very different from the rest of South India. As you take the gentle climb from the plains to Coorg or Kodagu as it is now known, you have beautifully-shaped mountainous rocks, areca palms, which produce betel nut, palm trees and then paddy – it’s a really stunning scape that looks a little bit like a 19th century English painting of India. The capital of Madikeri or Mercara as it was called before, looks like a town like any other town in India, but as you dig a little deeper, go and visit the vast estates and eat with locals, you find a generosity of spirit, an unbelievably high education level and a joy of preserving traditions…and that includes food.

Brewing up a storm

Kodavas look physically very different to people from Karnataka and the neighbouring Tamil Nadu. They are traditionally warriors, hunters and landowners. Literacy is almost 100 per cent. Their livelihood is mainly coffee and this area of just 5,000sqkms is the largest coffee producing area in India. History has it, that there was a gentleman called Baba Budan who brought coffee beans to the Chandragiri Hills in Chikmagalur from Yemen in the 17th century. Then the British came in the 19th century and found that this was a crop that they could also exploit since conditions for growing coffee were pretty perfect. That was the birth of widespread coffee plantations and coffee farming in this area.

Coorg coffee is grown at a high altitude and under a well defined two tier mixed shade canopy with over 50 types of trees and 270 species. Amongst the bigger evergreen trees are tall jackfruit, rosewood and wild fig trees, which protect the coffee from seasonal variations in temperature and also enhance the soil by providing nutrients from deeper layers. The second layer is pepper, cardamom, cloves, orange and banana. We went to Petu Kariappa’s 100 acre estate called Harangal in Madapur – by Coorg standards this is small. He is one of the few farmers who successfully grows the much sought after “diva” of coffee beans, Arabica. The beans are much more difficult to grow than the better yielding and bigger bushes of Robusta. Like many growers, he washes, removes the pulp and dries his beans and sells green coffee to bigger companies who then cure, roast and blend.

As far as food is concerned, Coorg is known for “spicy” food. This is a huge misconception. There are lots of spices - of course pepper, cardamom, cloves and the tiny birds eye chilli known as parangi. Spices are roasted and ground, which gives complexity and density of flavour to their dishes both vegetarian and meat. Although Coorg is known for the famous pork dish, pandi curry, which is a great specialty - there are a host of vegetable dishes that use local vegetables like bamboo shoot, wild mushrooms and a kind of red-leafed spinach, all quite delicious and different. The method of most of their cooking is that they roast and dry grind different spice combinations that are thrown into a quick stir fry, which gives a great flavour and of course uses less oil since the spices are already roasted.

Home feels

We stayed at the newly-opened Coorg Wilderness Resort – a different experience and in a stratosphere of its own to the little homestays with British bungalows, which Coorg is known for. It is a large resort of a 150 rooms and something quite fantastic in terms of space and facilities. So, if you do want to experience the wilderness, want to have a fantastic lunch in the middle of a forest and come back from a plantation visit to the comfort of a heated bathroom floor, this is the destination for you. If this isn’t enough, they have a very talented chef who produced the most amazing level of cuisine I’ve come across in a luxury hotel in a very long time. From painstakingly researched local recipes to produce wondrous Coorg lunches to the perfect Chicken 65 and velvety fish moilee, Ranjan and his team nailed it every time.

He even makes his own Coorg vinegar extracted from the dry kachampuli, a mangosteen like fruit which when dried produces a distinctive black vinegar, which is intensely sour. People say that it looks and tastes like Italian balsamic – not at all. It doesn’t have any sweetness - it just has a very clear sharpness, so you literally need a teaspoon of that in any dish to give a dish that particular “Coorg” flavour.

This is a vegetarian recipe from chef Ranjan’s kitchen. I think it is an extraordinary use of local ingredients mixed together in a roasted spice blend. He makes all his spice blends in house including a curry leaf podi, a dried prawn one and the one for pandi curry. For this recipe he uses local bamboo shoot but you can use tinned bamboo shoot too.

Baimbale Bharthad (Coorg Bamboo shoot stir fry)

Ingredients:

500g tender Bamboo shoot (fresh or canned) 1tbsp coriander seed1 tsp cumin seed5 dried red chillies1 tsp pepper corn¼ tsp fenugreek1tsp mustard seeds5 cloves garlic½ tsp kachampuli vinegar4 to 5 curry leaves1 medium onion, chopped 2 tsp sunflower oil

Method

If the bamboo shoots are fresh, wash and soak bamboo shoots in water for two days. Drain, slice or chop finely and boil with salt and turmeric powder for 15 to 20 minutes. Put all the dry spices in small pan and fry them, stirring constantly until they change colour and darken slightly, but do not allow the spices to turn dark brown. Grind to a fine powder. Add the spice powder to the boiled bamboo shoot and cook further for 15 minutes adding 1-2 cups of hot water if required. Add the vinegar. In a pan take 2tsp of oil. Add red chilli, mustard seeds, garlic (crushed), chopped onion and curry leaves. When the mustard splutters, pour over the tender bamboo shoot dish.

Author Bio: Culinary expert and explorer Karen Anand has been writing extensively on the subject of food and wine for 30 years. Apart from having her own brand of gourmet food products, she has anchored top rated TV shows, run a successful chain of food stores, founded the hugely successful Farmers Markets, and worked as restaurant consultant for international projects, among other things. Her latest passion is food tours, a totally curated experience which Karen herself accompanies, the first of which was to Italy.

This is a fortnightly column. The next edition will appear on September 15.